A Lesson Learned in Uruguay
MILLER, GEORGE A.
RESTORING DEMOCRACY A Lesson Learned in Uruguay BY GEORGE A. MILLER Montevideo Late winter has come to this elegant, Mediterranean-style city, and the winds blowing through its tree-lined streets...
...Five years later he lost to his Blanco challenger, Luis Alberto Lacalle...
...They held trials in their military courts for what we then called 'economic crimes,' closed the Congress, abolished labor unions, and shut down the universities," recalls Mario Olivera, a 42-year-old real estate salesman...
...Some want to muddle along the way we have so far, others want the shock treatment...
...The task of capturing, confining and convicting terrorists was handed to the military—which traditionally has enjoyed less prestige here than do its counterparts elsewhere in Latin America...
...In 1870 the Catholic Church was disestablished...
...Literacy is the highest in Latin America, just ahead of Chile and Argentina...
...A smaller number deplored it from the start...
...I put those questions to strangers I met and to acquaintances made during many trips here in the course of the past two decades...
...Uruguay always was a democratic country at heart, and remains so today," Perez of El Pais says...
...Its social services and relative affluence have long been the envy of neighbors...
...A league of urban guerrillas calling themselves Tupamaros seized the opportunity...
...There are two obstacles: the socio-economic situation and the military...
...helped Mexico and Central America eliminate the hoof-and-mouth disease...
...Ismel Perdomo, the owner of a two-chair barber shop, seems to express a more common view: "The generals don't want to come back...
...Twenty years ago the elected President and Congress, with the ap-proval of most Uruguayans, offered power to the Armed Forces to quell terrorist and union disruptions...
...Made up predominantly of university students and professionals, they captured the popular imagination initially by stealing from the rich and giving to charity...
...The police nearly always lost to the Tupamaros, and the jails couldn't hold them even when they were captured...
...But the consensus is that with memories of military rule still fresh, and the main parties moving closer to the political center, Uruguayan democracy is more solid than ever before...
...Or was democracy now firmly restored here...
...But like most people I spoke with, he expects next year's contest to go smoothly...
...It also was developing the two principal political parties most citizens still support, the Colorados and the Blancos?consisting at that time of warring gau-chos distinguished, respectively, by the red or white ribbons on their hats...
...Was it likely to recur in the event of some new crisis...
...They also hint at a season of politicking on the way as the country prepares for next year's general election—the third since Uruguay's 12-year military interregnum ended...
...But the real source of Uruguay's troubles then was the unrelenting slump that had begun in the mid-'50s...
...Julio Maria Sanguinetti was elected President in November 1984 and inaugurated the following March...
...Democracy began for us with the writing of the Constitution in 1830," says Guillermo Perez, 56, an administrative officer at the other major daily, the conservative El Pais...
...They gave it up...
...but never before given a real mission, the soldiers wiped out the guerrillas so swiftly that they astonished even themselves, and were immediately urged by ultra-Right elements in politics and the media to take on new assignments...
...The mood at the end of the '60s was ripe for revolt...
...On the economic front, the government had been creating or taking control of so many enterprises that these accounted for 30 per cent of the GNP when the present Constitution was adopted in 1967...
...As midlevel wage earners were forced to find second or third jobs, the Communists took control of the labor unions...
...The Colorado Party came away with 41 per cent of the vote, the National Party (the official Blanco designation) 34, and the Broad Front (a coalition of Leftist groups) 21 percent...
...Today, generally speaking, the former are viewed as liberals and the latter as conservatives, although both might be described as centrist...
...The 1903 inauguration of President Jose Battle y Ordonez—who had founded El Dia as the editorial voice of the Colorado Party—marked the start of Uruguay's rapid modernization...
...These days the ex-President drives his own car around town without a bodyguard, and plays soccer Saturday mornings on the beach with friends...
...Massive repression and the failure of stringent measures to restart the economy led some 300,000 younger Uruguayans to emigrate, leaving an aging population and a social security fund awash in red ink...
...The coup was against the very core of our society...
...At that point, a dialogue was opened with the Colorados and the Blancos, who had united with most other parties to demand political freedom...
...Their responses can best be understood in the context of the country's history...
...Economic hardship, accompanied by rampant corruption, disrupted the equilibrium Uruguay had long enjoyed...
...Any visitor standing on a Montevideo street corner, taking in the architecture and the faces of passersby, would probably agree...
...Within eight years it had more railroad miles in proportion to its size than any nation in the Western Hemisphere...
...George A. Miller, a previous con trib-utor to The New Leader, is a retired Foreign Services officer who was stationed in Latin America for 12 years...
...In February 1973 Bordaberry made a pact with the Armed Forces guaranteeing their participation in the power process...
...After gradually assuming full control of the government, Army leaders called a referendum, submitted to its verdict and stepped down...
...We are about 45 per cent Spanish and about 45 per cent Italian, with the rest coming from various other European countries," explains Fernando Caputi, 54, managing editor of the respected morning daily El Dia...
...Well-trained by the U.S...
...During the first third of the 19th century, while the U.S...
...Under Batlle, too, a social security system was instituted, including a national health service, and free universal education pushed the literacy rate well above 90 per cent...
...type primary system...
...He goes on to stress, however, that "we have to plan for the future...
...Eventually all sides agreed to hold a general election on the last Sunday of November—the traditional day—in 1984...
...Early one Friday morning in April 1972, the Tupamaros shot to death a Navy officer on his way to work, a police inspector and his driver, and a former Minister of Interior as he stepped out his front door...
...South America's smallest nation?roughly the size of Oklahoma—once more boasts the continent's most stable democracy...
...Lev, a Communist who has been a banking official, favors replacing the Ley de Lemas with a U.S...
...In effect, the nation holds its primary, presidential and congressional contests simultaneously...
...It is widely believed that Sanguinetti will be re-elected President because of his outstanding performance during the crucial transition administration...
...According to Minister of Culture Antonio Mercader, who ran the Blanco's '89 campaign, the return to electoral politics was "difficult...
...In the case of the top job, victory is awarded to the party that receives the largest total number of votes, with the office itself going to the candidate whose faction wins the biggest share of that total...
...It met all night and emerged with a statement suspending civil liberties and declaring a "state of internal war...
...The government could do nothing about union outrages...
...We were getting tired of it," recalls Jose Romer, 57, a waiter in Montevideo...
...Following several years of civil strife, elections were held at regular intervals and waves of European immigrants started to arrive...
...Muggings are unheard of in the overwhelmingly bourgeois capital, home to nearly half the country's 3 million inhabitants...
...The legislature consists of a 33-seat Senate and a 99-seat Chamber of Deputies...
...Nevertheless, over the years the voters have tinkered with the structure of power—particularly the executive branch, which has alternated between a nine-man council and the one-man presidency currently in place...
...The talks proceeded slowly...
...Yet they could not easily duplicate its Constitution and government, for in important respects Uruguay is unique...
...There is little extreme wealth, and none of the dreadful poverty found in some inner-city and rural areas of the United States...
...That day President Juan Maria Bordaberry called an emergency joint session of Congress...
...The majority of the people I questioned also would like to see an increase in the President's powers...
...his decision (with the generals' approval) to dissolve Congress that June marked the birth of Uruguay's "installment-plan coup...
...Indeed, the most remarkable feature of Uruguay—ethnically, culturally, economically, and politically—may be its homogeneity...
...After working closely with the President, the generals ultimately ousted him in 1976, near the end of his term, and steadily tightened their grip...
...There were some threats then...
...Meanwhile, the unions started waging a war of strikes in public services: One day there would be no buses or streetcars running, and the next no water, no electricity or no banks open...
...I see no chance of another coup," Sanguinetti, a 57-year-old lawyer and former newspaper publisher, told me re-cently in his office...
...The current wisdom holds that Sanguinetti, whose Colorado Party was voted out in 1989, is the front-runner for the November 1994 presidential contest...
...Torture and "disappearances"—now rarely discussed—became regular practices...
...Also, neither the extreme Right nor the extreme Left has much force anymore, and the Tupamaros are part of the establishment, part of our folklore...
...In his inaugural address he made it clear to everyone that from then on he would be running things," says Caputi...
...Teenage girls may stroll the streets at midnight without fear, and people treat each other with a degree of civility reminiscent of pre-War England...
...RESTORING DEMOCRACY A Lesson Learned in Uruguay BY GEORGE A. MILLER Montevideo Late winter has come to this elegant, Mediterranean-style city, and the winds blowing through its tree-lined streets already bear the first whiff of spring...
...They wanted to get out—but with honor...
...When their activities escalated to political kidnapping-for-profit and assassination, the public became alarmed...
...There is a very strong identification with those principles, despite some dissatisfaction with the way they function...
...And nearly all of us have that whole mix within ourselves...
...was populating its Louisiana territories and espousing the Monroe Doctrine, Uruguay was fighting for independence from the two giants it borders, Argentina and Brazil...
...The country's once-booming trade in wool and beef was undermined by the development of synthetic fabrics, and by the fact that the U.S...
...The military broke along tradition and suffered for it...
...The Swift and Armour meat packing companies, for example, sold their plants here (to the government, of course) and moved further north...
...Caputi—who came out of exile in Brazil to become Sanguinetti's assistant press secretary before returning to his job at El Dia—agrees...
...This was rejected in a 1980 referendum by 57 per cent of the voters...
...Little wonder that it came to be seen as a paradigm of progress in the region...
...Toward the end the military didn't know what to do about the economy,'' Caputi explains...
...Some of the generals continue to believe they know how to run the country better than politicians...
...We have to get back to thinking of ourselves as a people, not just about 'me and my family.' We have to relearn the importance of working together...
...In 1951 the people approved the Ley de Lemas, a complex scheme that permits every party to name a candidate from each of its sub-Lemas, or factions, in presidential and congressional elections held every five years...
...A free republic for the better part of two centuries, this rolling, fertile land recently took an unusual detour from democracy...
...At first a great many citizens viewed the Army's role as a grim yet necessary antidote to the country's social and economic woes...
...The tiny refuge grew prosperous from the sale of meat, hides and wool abroad...
...As Caputi puts it, "We've learned our lesson...
...As I explored Montevideo, where museums, theaters, thriving book shops, and art galleries abound, or traveled by punctual buses through towns and villages from the high interior to the magnificent beaches that line the coast, I wondered what imprint military rule had left...
...Many here say it is not Latin American at all, but rather "a European society that happens to be located across the Atlantic...
...Because the vote was extremely close, Lacalle has headed a coalition government...
...But we still have to consolidate democracy," Broad Front Deputy Leon Lev, 48, warned when I visited him at the Parliament Building, where one encounters no guards at the doors...
...In addition, laws were passed that mandated an eight-hour work day, legalized divorce, and made Uruguay the first Latin American country to grant women the right to vote...
...To legitimize their rule, Army leaders proposed a new constitution that would give the military partial control of a "restricted democracy...
...Sanguinetti, the Colorado leader known as a social democrat and a political gradualist, guided the country firmly back to democracy...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 10
